The Oracle database has its own data dictionary, a set of tables where it stores all information about the database and what’s in it.
Data of these tables are available through views, data dictionary views.
In the following example I’ll use the data dictionary view that holds the information on columns.
I created a function that returns the number of columns for a certain table.

First keynote session was brought by Chris Leone about Oracle Fusion applications.
Applications is not my thing, but it was nice to see how everything in Fusion apps is integrated like BI and collaboration.

My first session was “The best way” by Tom Kyte, a session about doing things the “best way” or “best practices”.
Tom quoted Bryn Llewellyn on what brings you to best practices.
It depends on things from “reasoning skills” over “education” to “know oracle inside out” to “know pl/sql inside out”.

An example join two big tables(big… big tables) with little distinct values.
What will be the fastest(best) way to retrieve records for one of those distinct values: hash joins or index scans?
In a batch operation the hash joins will be the fastest, but on a screen that only shows 20 records?

So, when is something the best way? Well, it depends…

How can you tune using TKPROF?
A best practice…
Get the facts(physical I/O, logical I/O, difference between CPU and elapsed time,…).
Infer more facts. Know your data, know how oracle works.
Build your context.
Rule things out.
Very interesting session!

Time for lunch!

Next session was one of Lucas Jellema and Patrick Stevens: “Randstad’s modernization of organization, architecture and applications powered by Fusion Middleware”.
They explained how they transformed the IT team to work with the agile approach.
This resulted in a faster develoment(about 4 times) and a team that is more involved.
Randstad also decided to make their applications service based.
So a service layer was build around all core processes using BPEL and OSB.
The only problem is Forms, which still accesses the database directly.
The Forms application will fade away in the future to a web application in ADF…

Last session was another AMIS session by Luc Bors together with Simon Vos of bol.com: “How BOL.COM benefited from ADF”.
Bol.com decided in 2007 to move to ADF.
Some reasons to move:
– Oracle statement of direction: exit designer
– no authorization/authentication
– forms supported datamodel, not business processes
Where did they want to go to:
– SSO
– new and extended UI
– add reporting
– no direct database access

So they introduced scrum, ADF and trained they’re inhouse (forms)developers to use JDeveloper, ADF and JHeadstart.
Now they could start to rebuild the forms application in ADF.
The pl/sql and built-ins used in forms are put in the database or, if lucky, they could use an ADF alternative.
Others(little percentage) had to be programmed in Java.

This resulted in a new application with the same functionality(allthough some additional functionality was added) as the forms application with a new look and feel.

Some interesting sessions, allthough I like to see some more demos next time.